31 Mar 2001 ::
We've been listening to the "Bloodhound gang"
band in the office recently. Specially I liked
the "Ballad of Chasey Lain" thing.. And I
recommend it to everyone here, the lyrics can be
read here.
Enjoy :).. [ more.. ]

11 Jan 2006 ::
The company he worked for back in the 90s took part in some exhibition in Dallas. At
some point they realized they couldn't handle it anymore with the resources they had and
that they badly needed another pair of hands. To get that, they decided to bring another
guy over from Germany... [ more.. ]

First of all, I would like to congratulate all the Slavs, half-Slavs,
quarter-Slavs, pseudo-Slavs and super-Slavs with the holiday, the day of
the Slavonic culture. Here in Romania noone knows about it.. Though it
would be nice because the local culture and language have a lot of
Slavonic elements. I wonder what they know in general? Even on the 9th
May when we came with a bottle of shampaign to a hostel to some local
ladies we knew, they asked what was the reason. Anyway, everyone who
supports the Slavonic soul (it's really difficult to escape from it if
you've already got one), and Cyrillic alphabet (well, not all the
Slavonic nations use it, whatever), today should celebrate it somehow. I
think we've got something to be proud about!

Well, actually I'm not that sure they don't know any holidays. Some
dates are really celebrated here actively. For example, the day of
Konstantin and Elena which took place on the 21st May. I found out about
it in the morning in a taxi, after our Indian manager phoned me from the
office and said there was an urgent thing to do. That's why I had to be
at work as soon as possible. Anyway, I didn't expected that whole the
day Romanian guys and ladies would be congratulating me. I felt like I
had another birthday. One of the guys said "Happy Birthday" in Russian,
obviously wasn't knowing the difference in our language between
expressions for the day of the name (angel's day?) and the for day when
someone had been born. And in the evening two colleagues of mine whose
names were Costel (was considered their day too) decided to take the
whole office staff for some beer to a restaurant.

Was surfing the Net and occasionally got to the pixelsusi site. There a Russian guy
who lives and works now in quite a non-Slavonic place - New-York, from
time to time writes his observations. Even more, they're written in
quite a Slavonic matter, in Cyrillic and sometimes with some Slavonic
curse words :)

And more about culture (the Slavonic one, of course). Recently I started
missing the good old times, when being first-year students at the
university my friends and I were fans of the humoristic radio-show
"P.D.S". It was distributed every week on Friday nights on the late
"Radio-50" station. Several times we visited their concerts, and at one
of them I was introduced to the program authors and shoke Kovalchuk's
hand (don't wash it till now, j/k). Melancholy came to me in the moment
when I found a CD with their mp3 tracks on a shelve. I brought it from
Kharkov. Then I decided to find out something about their current
activities, and fired up the
google. It was a real surprise to find a site of the project and to find
out that in March they gave another concert in Kharkov. Have to admit
though, I found no new songs released later my university-first-year
times (1998). The good thing is that all of the songs are available for
downloading from their own site (hint, hint!). Also, still I remember a
beautiful voice of a radio-journalist Olya Rodzyanko, with which she
read her own articles on various topics. Really nice time it was. Still
fond of the "The
president" song of theirs.

Let's finish with something technical. Recently there was a need to
write several CGIs in PHP. It happens frequently that not-very-new
technologies are discovered like a real revelation by me. Anyway, I'm
pretty sure there are quite a plenty of stubborn guys like I was before
I knew PHP. The language learning process took me about 3 minutes, and I
needed another 10 minutes to write and debug the applications. So, if
you're still writing your web applications in Perl, give it up and go to
php.net to read the tutorial.